how do people actually reason in public?

Leave a reply

Considering the vast literature on public deliberation and deliberative democracy, there’s surprisingly little research on how people actually reason when they meet in groups to discuss public issues. I was delighted, therefore, to read Brian E. Adams’ paper “Conversational Dynamics in Deliberative Forums: The Use of Evidence and Logic.”

Adams coded and analyzed transcripts of National Issues Forums. (For full disclosure, I sit on the board of the Kettering Foundation, which created and supports the NIF.) Participants voluntarily met for moderated discussions of immigration or energy policy. They tilted somewhat toward the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum but they were diverse.

Adams doesn’t assess the quality of their reasons, seeing such judgments as too subjective, but he does ask whether participants made proposals and supported them with clear and relevant reasons. He codes just 10% of the statements as “free-floating” conclusions or definitions, without any reasons. But he thinks that the “deliberators were unable to articulate their arguments clearly and develop logically sound reasoning.”

Sometimes, I think, Addams is too stringent in his judgments. For instance, this is supposed to be an example of a person who was “unable to articulate” both evidence and a conclusion:

Yesterday the headlines in the newspaper were “Al Qaeda finds that the best way to get into the country now is the Mexican border.” And we talked earlier a little bit about removing the border guards to some extent. That simply is not going to fly in this country in this day and age. Your point about the illegal trafficking, hey, that’s how they’re going to come in. And so … [trails off] (George, Cedar Rapids)

This is not a highly articulate remark, but I don’t think that George actually had to state that because terrorists could cross the Southern border, we need to make security tight. He has left some premises unstated, but that is an appropriate way to talk when others share your premises. Arguments with implicit but understood premises are “enthymemes,” and they are OK.  Of course, whether terrorists really come across the Southern border–and whether they can be efficiently stopped–are different questions, but George potentially contributes that that discussion.

I also think it’s fine that many remarks are simply questions. For example, someone says, “One of the things that we typically don’t address is what are realistic expectations for healthcare?” Adams first analyzes this remark as “avoidance of reasoned argumentation” because it lacks a conclusion or proposal, but I would read it more as a “springboard to further discussion” (a point that Adams concedes a bit later on).

Overall, I’d say that a certain style of public rhetoric (with explicit premises leading to policy conclusions) is desirable, and we ought to teach it because it doesn’t come naturally. But it is not the only kind of rhetoric that contributes to public reasoning. Throwing in a fact, asking a question, expressing a doubt, telling a personal anecdote, offering moral support–these are also helpful forms of discourse.

major new CIRCLE study on non-college youth

Leave a reply

Today, CIRCLE released our study entitled “That’s Not Democracy. How Out-of-School Youth Engage in Civic Life and What Stands in Their Way.” It’s really the fruit of several years’ work, including focus groups and survey analysis.

The study documents the deep sense of alienation experienced by working-class young adults in an era when the organizations that traditionally organized and engaged them–unions, churches, grassroots political parties, and metropolitan daily newspapers–are  shattered, and national leaders generally ignore their concerns.

On the positive side, it shows that they discuss political issues, perhaps with more intensity than their college-bound peers, and they want to engage, especially on behalf of the children in their households and neighborhoods. It’s a bookend to our major study of YouthBuild USA, which found that when young people from similar backgrounds are recruited and encouraged to be leaders, they thrive. The implication from putting the two studies together is clear: invest in working class young adults!

Cathy Cohen’s Democracy Remixed

1 Reply

Perspectives on Politics (vol. 10, no 3, Sept. 2012) includes a symposium on Cathy J. Cohen’s book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics. Cohen studies young African Americans’ political thinking at a time when they are widely stereotyped and disparaged–by Black leaders, among others–for their personal behavior. Cohen explores the political relevance of their attitudes toward sexuality and other conventionally “personal” issues. She uses interviews and surveys to convey the often nuanced and sophisticated ideas of Black youth.

I organize my own review* around the axis of structure versus agency, beginning thus:

In 2009, in the city of Chicago where Cathy J. Cohen lives and teaches, at least 290 school children were shot. Most of the people on both ends of the guns were young African Americans. If the fundamental responsibility of a government is protect citizens’ lives, then such violence puts the very legitimacy of the regime in question, to say nothing of the human tragedy that each gunshot represents.

An epidemic of violence also raises a contested and troubling question of responsibility, or (in more academic terms) of agency versus structure. From one perspective, firing a gun at another young person is a choice. The vast majority of young black Chicagoans would never do such a thing. If citizens see the perpetrators of gun violence as having agency, they are likely to blame them for their choice and respond with surveillance and punishment. They may also be tempted to direct moral disapproval at the group to which they mentally assign the perpetrator: in this case, young African Americans. Dropping out of high school, using illegal drugs, and having premarital sex can also be seen as condemnable individual choices requiring discipline, deterrence, and moral suasion.

Structural explanations, in contrast, look to large social and institutional factors—not only intentional policies but also examples of inaction or inertia. From this perspective, the huge and lightly regulated market for hand guns; the poor performance of urban public schools and police; the strikingly low ratio of adults to children in some poor urban neighborhoods;1 the vast prison system that provides economic benefits to companies, employees, and communities; the persistence of racial discrimination in labor markets; the lack of after-school opportunities and programs; the broad public glorification of violence; and even the disappearance of 650,000 manufacturing jobs in the Chicago metropolitan area since 1960—all would rank as background causes of teen violence.

The African American youth in Cohen’s book hold complex and self-conscious ideas about agency versus structure in their own lives. I argue in my review for the importance of a third topic: political agency. This means neither making individual choices nor being affected by large forces, but rather shaping the world together,  intentionally and collectively. Cohen promotes political agency by giving voice to young Black Americans in her writing and via the Black Youth Project, which she runs. I end with a call for more thinking about large-scale policies that would promote youth political agency.

Carmen Sirianni’s review is the most critical. In this short blog post, I don’t want to summarize his critique or the relevant aspects of Cohen’s book (both are too complicated), but this example gives a flavor of the dispute. “Obama thinks that passing saggy pants laws [is] a ‘waste of time,’ but, he continues, ‘having said that, brothers should pull up their pants’ (p. 142) as a sign of respect for their mothers, grandmothers, and other people in general.” Here are two ways to think about that case:

  1. African American youth are already subject to damaging stereotypes from all kinds of authority figures, and the last thing they need is for the first Black president to pile on. His rhetoric of personal responsibility makes it almost impossible for others to get a hearing for structural explanations of things like teen violence. Worse, Obama represents the neoliberal, carceral state. He should promote justice before he tells anyone else how to dress.
  2. Although how high you wear a belt is an arbitrary matter, setting norms is generally an appropriate role for leaders. Norms strengthen communities. Teenagers are going to break norms. That is no reason for panic, but also no reason for leaders to abandon a paternalistic stance toward children. Generations negotiate their roles through just such struggles.

These are simplified positions that may not reflect Cohen’s or Sirianni’s views accurately, but they suggest the terrain of an important argument.

In my review, I try to convey some of the emotional impact of this book, but Taeku Lee probably puts it better. He writes:

On a very personal note, the net result is that Cohen pulls off something uncommon at the hands of a scholar (especially a political scientist): her work evokes emotions. I do not mean here the eruptions of ire, petulance, and provocation that often result when one academic finds the work of another to be inept, polemical, or mean-spirited. Rather, in reading the book, one cannot help but feel the sense of hope and despair, anger and pride that comes from kindling the bonds of human connection. Cohen achieves this by being unafraid of making a mess: She willingly mixed the politics of her personal convictions with the science in her data analysis; she looks for agency where others might be content to find only structure; she sees in the dimly lit margins shadows of seldom heard, yet at times luminous, voices. In short, she brilliantly performs the dictates of a remix: to breath new life into a tune by sampling fresh beats and, by doing so, extending that tune’s relevance and improving the fidelity of its original aspirations.

*Peter Levine (2012). Race in America. Perspectives on Politics, Volume 10, Issue 03, September 2012 pp 757-760 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=8667311

what is public philosophy?

2 Replies

Joshua Miller has an interesting blog post on the definition of “public philosophy.” Although I hold a philosophy PhD and spend all my time thinking about civic engagement, public scholarship, the engaged university, and related topics, I have never really addressed the overlapping part of the Venn diagram: philosophy that is public. That is an active intellectual community, but I am not yet sure what it means or whether I want to be part of it.

“Philosophy” can mean several different enterprises. In this context, we are talking predominantly about moral philosophy/ethics and political/social philosophy. Some think that is basically values-clarification. Anthony Laden calls it conceptual optometry, bringing ideas into sharper focus.* So then the philosopher’s job in relation to the public would be clarifying other people’s ideas. Jonathan Dancy has said that moral philosophy explains what we are doing when we think morally; it doesn’t change our thinking at all. So then a philosopher’s role [in] relation to the public would be something like explaining what people do when they talk about public issues. A third option is the development and defense of moral ideas. Karl Marx and Friedrich von Hayek didn’t just explain or sharpen distinctions; they wrote manifestos.

The word “public,” too, has many meanings. It often means those outside a given reference group. For the police, the public means everyone who isn’t a law enforcement official or a criminal suspect or defendant. For academics, the public means non-academics. For philosophers, it may include academics who don’t teach philosophy. Its referent shifts around in that way.

In some theories, the word “public” takes on specialized meanings. For Dewey, it means the people when they are conscious of their issues and powers. Thus it is desirable to turn a people into a public. Conceivably, a philosopher could help that transformation happen, which would be “public philosophy” in a Deweyan vein.

In general, the kind of public scholarship that interests me most is that which (a) involves research collaborations between academics and non-academics and (b) strengthens the capacity of non-academics. At its best, community-based participatory social science works that way: laypeople help define research problems and hypotheses, help collect and interpret data, and become more knowledgeable and effective as a result. This is different from “public scholarship” in the sense of scholarship that is well-known and accessible. It is also different from activist scholarship, because activism often implies an agenda, whereas public engagement implies a willingness to deliberate ends and means.

Exploring moral issues is often not seen as scholarship or research at all. Starting in grade school, we very widely teach students to be positivists: facts can be true or false, but values are subjective opinions. Although you can study the values that people hold, investigating their truth is not a job for scholarship or research (and involves no expertise). But I view moral philosophy as a professional investigation into the truth of moral propositions, and doing that with laypeople might be “public moral philosophy.”

*Anthony Simon Laden, “Learning to be Equal: Just Schools and Schools of Justice,” in Education, Justice and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

notes on Auden’s September 1, 1939

10 Replies

These are notes on W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” a poem that can be read in full here. (My notes on several other poems are collected here.)

The poem begins, “I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second street. …” That would be a gay bar, probably the Dizzy Club, to which Auden had been introduced by his American lover Chester Kallman. But “I” implies that the writer sits alone. There’s a gay couple in stanza 6,  Nijinksy and Diaghilev, who are introduced in contrast to the “normal heart.” Auden is asking whether his own love is “normal”–and also whether human love (in general) is a source of evil or a solution to it.

Kallman and a few others would recognize this particular bar, and maybe they knew or could imagine what Auden really did on the evening when Hitler invaded Poland. In that sense, the poem was a private communication. But it was destined for The New Republic and written in an accessible style about events in the world. Thus it was also an effort to communicate to a public of strangers. Even if Auden’s original readers missed the reference to a gay bar, they would know what a “dive” is. It’s a place for solitary drinking or for secretive, sometimes shameful encounters. In that sense, it is private: a place one goes not to be seen. At the same time, it’s public in that it’s no one’s home and anyone can walk in: in fact, the British might call it a public house (a “pub”). Throughout the poem, Auden wants us to consider the relationship between private and public.

A related question is the role of lyric poetry, which can be private, subtle, and confessional, or transparent, impersonal, and political–or both. Auden later repudiated “September 1, 1939,” along with four other political poems, requiring that a note be added whenever they were anthologized: “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.” I think that’s because he later decided that the explicit, hortatory, public slogans of these poems (for instance, “We must love one another or die”) were false to his own experience. But to communicate effectively in the public sphere requires a degree of simplification and even falsification.

Continue reading →